From 1865 to 1999, the Sherborne School boarding house known as The Green occupied the former Angel Inn on Greenhill. In 1999, the boarders moved across the road to Greenhill House which was renamed The Green.
The Angel Inn was a coaching inn, built around 1750. On 31 August 1865, the Rev. O.W. Tancock opened the former Angel Inn as The Green, a school boarding house with 12 boarders. In 1872, Tancock purchased the house from Messrs. Ffooks for £2200, and in 1872-1873 added a dormitory wing and studies costing £1801. The property was sold by housemaster to housemaster until in 1929 the School Governors purchased it, with the help of Sir Edward Iliffe, for £6,300 from the Rev. W.J. Bensly (Old Shirburnian). In 1999 the building was sold to Ash Mill Developments Ltd. who converted it into flats. Until 1946, the Houseman of The Green lived in The Cottage (or The Cott) adjoining The Green.
The ‘new’ Green in the former Greenhill House was opened as a school boarding house in September 1999 by Lord Robert Iliffe, grandson of Sir Edward Iliffe who in 1929 had helped purchase the ‘old’ Green for the School. To accommodate the new house a wing and a housemaster’s house were built in the former garden.
Greenhill House was built in the 17th century by the Eastmonts, a family of rich clothiers. In 1722, the house was inherited by John Eastmont’s daughter, Dorothy, who was married to Carew Hervy Mildmay (1690-1784) MP of Hazlegrove, Somerset. In 1807, the house was purchased at auction for £670 by Thomas Fooks (1775-1844), a Sherborne solicitor and School Governor. The house remained in the Fooks/Ffooks family for the next 153 years, being occupied by a number of tenants, including Major James John Loudon McAdam (1841- 1910) and the Rev. Arthur Field (Old Shirburnian).
Sherborne and the garden of Greenhill House features in Horace Annesley Vachell’s novel The Other Side (1910). Vachell, who had briefly lived in the town as a child, returned to Sherborne in the 1950s, living opposite Greenhill House at Priory House on Greenhill.
In January 1915, Mrs McAdam, as Commandant, set up a VAD auxiliary hospital at Greenhill Court on Greenhill. The Greenhill Hospital remained open until 10 December 1918, having by then treated 904 patients. In May 1916, four revolving huts for the purpose of ‘open-air treatment’ were erected in the garden of Mrs McAdam’s home, Greenhill House (now The Green). It is believed that Greenhill was the first hospital in Dorset to adopt this treatment, which was found to be particularly beneficial to patients suffering from septic wounds or gas poisoning.
The mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing returned to Sherborne for the last time in March 1953, when he read a paper on the subject of the ‘Electronic Brain’ at a meeting of The Alchemists held at The Green (now The Old Green).
On 21 November 1960, Greenhill House was purchased by the School Governors. Bequests from the Rev. Arthur Field OS and from Dr Elizabeth Gourlay in memory of her brother A.B. Gourlay paid for the renovation of the building. In January 1977 Greenhill House was opened as the Greenhill House Study Centre for international students, with Frank Francis as its first Warden (Principal). By 1991 the Study Centre had outgrown Greenhill House and, thanks to a generous bequest from the Bow family, it moved down the road to Newell Grange and is today known as Sherborne International.
The ‘new’ Green (formerly Greenhill House) is a Grade II Listed Building.
Former Green boys have included Jimmy Adams (Hampshire County cricketer), Rowland de Winton Aldridge (architect, architectural historian and artist), Ernest Beaton (business man & father of Cecil Beaton), John Cordingley (British Army Officer), Patrick Cordingley (British Army Officer and author), Charlie Cox (actor who has appeared in Daredevil, Stardust and The Theory of Everything), Christopher Curwen (MI6 Chief), Dennis Eagar (composer), Nick Greenstock (England Rugby International), Alexander Phelps Hodges MC (British Army Officer), Charles Hudson VC (British Army Officer), Anthony Lane (journalist and film critic), Frederick Octavius Pickard-Cambridge (arachnologist, naturalist, biological illustrator), Albert Reginald Powys (architect and Secretary of SPAB), Llewelyn Powys (author and journalist), William Ernest Powys (farmer), John Tallent (England Rugby International), Chris Vacher (presenter and reporter on BBC TV Points West), Philip Wayre (naturalist, film producer, founder of the Norfolk Wildlife Park and the Otter Trust).
House letter: c.
House colours: yellow and black.
House magazines: The Wilsonian, The Evergreen.
Housemasters:
1865 Osborne William Tancock (1839-1930)
1880 Thomas Ward Wilson (1849-1924)
1905 Henry Dunkin (1861-1949)
1921 William James Bensly (OS) (1874-1943)
1929 Herbert Henry Brown (1891-1963)
1936 Samuel Hey (1904-1977)
1951 Laurence May (1914-1997)
1966 Michael Earls-Davis (OS) (1921-2016)
1975 David Oldham (1932-1988)
1984 Michael Cleaver
1996 Giles Reynolds
2008 Alistair Hatch (OS)
2018 Stephen Byrne
2020 Alexandra Pearson
2022 William Mackenzie-Green
Online Resources:
- The Green house photographs
- The Green roll of honour
- Victoria Cross Recipients
- Frederick Octavius Pickard-Cambridge FZS: Sherborne’s Spider Man
- The Greenhill VA Hospital in the First World War
- Experiences in the RFC by Lieutenant Antony Whitford-Hawkey, November 1917
- Denis Eagar’s War Hymn, September 1914
- Sherborne’s Kindertransport Children
- The Green boys’ accounts of the bombing of Sherborne on 30 September 1940
- P.S. Jackson-Taylor and Firefly, one of the ‘Little Ships of Dunkirk’
- The Green embroidered curtain presented to Sam Hey on his retirement in 1951
- Brigadier Patrick Cordingley’s Gulf War diary, 1991
- The Green handbook, 2025
- History of Sherborne School’s boarding houses
For further information about the Sherborne School Archives please contact the School Archivist
Return to the School Archives homepage